After a long wait, Hydejack 8 finally sees the day of its release. It makes Hydejack look more elegant (no more super bold headings) and introduces features that make your site more impressive to first time visitors, while loading faster for repeat visitors.

Hydejack offers a few additional features to markup your markdown. Don’t worry, these are merely CSS classes added with kramdown’s {:...} syntax, so that your content remains compatible with other Jekyll themes.

There should be whitespace between paragraphs. We recommend including a README, or a file with information about your project.

While v7 brings an insane amount of new stuff, the most notable change is the new background image. It is no longer anti-selling the theme. The old image was a blurred version of Napoleon Bonaparte, which was just… weird. I could tell the story of how this came to be, but I’d rather show you the new and improved background image.

This maintenance release includes various quality-of-life improvements, especially when using the gem-based version of the theme. These changes come in handy when using Hydejack for a quick (project-) page: The home layout, which is used when using jekyll new, is now a proper layout that displays a few posts/pages below the regular content, and it is again possible to define an author in _config.yml without setting up a _data directory (for more, see blow).